ham fisted theatrics

“It takes a couple of years to get used to,” says Eric who we have a meeting with our second morning here. “You’ll hate it for a long time.” When we get back to the car, Dan has gotten a parking ticket. Later, we realize someone or something has broken his driver's side mirror.

I have seen a lot of very L.A. things since I have been here but the most L.A. thing I have seen is a community board at Starbucks covered, absolutely covered, in inkjet-printed fliers for a Shawn Mullins show. Shawn Mullins had a hit in the late 90’s called “Rockabye.” If you don’t remember it, clearly you weren’t white and boring in the late 90’s.

While walking to that Starbucks, I look in a Laundromat window and see a blue mesh top hanging with some other laundry that has a picture of Drew Carey ironed on to it. Meggie and Dominic note that it is probably what someone wore to the Price Is Right. And now they are having it professionally cleaned.

I was dreading getting a car but by now I am resigned to it and want to get it over with. Dan is nice enough to drive me to the used car place, and Meggie comes along because she’s also looking for a car. On the way there, we see kids from a day camp converging on a city park to have a color war, with flags and face-paint and t-shirts all in their team’s color. A few blocks later, a bald man sits cross-legged on some gravel painting a low wall with a rough and uneven surface with a paint roller, which seems like the worst tool to paint a rough, uneven wall with. The whole thing looks like an existential punishment. There’s a dog sitting next to him.

Dan is a great guy to bring with you when you are buying a car because he will ask a thousand questions you never thought of and loves the sport of it. The slick used-car superstore has a No-Haggle Policy which, as we learn, is hard and fast, and kind of takes the wind out of Dan’s haggling sails, but he is still very helpful as he keeps me from financing the car through a seventy-year payment structure or cheaping out on things like a windshield or doors.

Every car at this place has a history, and the straightforward salesman shows me the car I’m looking at’s history. Apparently cars can have gone through a lot. This car for instance, was never on the Grey Market. I imagine my car begging on the corner in a teeming slum and then bringing its earnings back to a cruel, abusive stationwagon with busted taillights. I am happy it did not go through that. When you are buying a used car you are buying all its ghosts and traumas and if the record is to be believed my car had few to none, which is good.

When it is time to make the down payment, I realize I don’t have my checkbook. It is 2009 and I am twenty-four years old and we don’t typically have our checkbooks on us, right? Still, it was dumb of me. Meggie drives me to the nearest Chase so I can get money. It is a Washinton Mutual that recently became a Chase when WaMu closed down. The bank has airlocks and metal detectors you have to pass through but once inside it’s a too-cool-for-school open-plan bank where, instead of windows, all the tellers stand at little islands that are in a large circle, and you go up to them, and while you’re conducting your business you feel bad that they have to stand their all day in a setting that, for all its new-agey pleasantness, is still a bank.

As a money machine in the wall we have gone up to after a half an hour of waiting for the teller to get through to someone at Chase and verify that I am who I say I am because this bank has not fully converted from a WaMu to a Chase is spitting out a large sum of my money in very small denominations, and we are counting it like the teller said we should, I realize too late what an actual no-fooling adult would have realized in the first place which is, I should’ve just gotten a cashier’s check. Meggie puts the envelope full of down payment in her purse and we walk very fast to her car.

Several times throughout the day I have to give an old New York address and show someone my Arizona driver’s license and then give them my new L.A. address. No one thinks it’s normal. I am a national man of mystery.

Driving back from the bank, we see seagulls perched on a dumpster outside a restaurant called Pollo Campero. Oh, right, there’s an ocean here.

At the dealership, a nice lady counts my small bills, muttering numbers in Spanish as she does so. A nice man named Jose has me sign all the paperwork I need to sign after my down payment is processed. There are no fewer than ten thousand forms. I never stop signing things. I am still signing them as we speak. Someday when I have a kid, and I have to sign things before leaving the hospital with that kid, and I have to sign fewer forms than I did to purchase a used car, I will break my glowing wife’s maternal reverie to make an observation to the effect of how crazy that is, that it is more forms for one thing than for the other.

Finally the process is over and though it was long and slow it was in no way the head-splitting life-rape I feared it might be. Having Dan and Meggie there was very comforting and helpful. It is late enough to be getting purple outside and I follow Dan and Meggie home playing Disc Two of The Story Of The Clash. The first song I play in my new car is “White Man (In Hammersmith Palais.)” I feel adult and accomplished. I have a 2003 Jetta, the same car that your girl cousin who’s in high school has.

Donald got a car too, and at dinner that night at a restaurant that serves only garlic-derived things all we can talk about is cars, all of us, at length. Pantywaisted New Yorkers who a week ago could not have given a shit about cars except as things to shout “I’M WALKIN’ HERE” at, now we look at and judge and envy these things we never noticed before. It’s like we went through adolescence, an adolescence where instead of starting to notice girls, we started noticing cars.

My experience of L.A. up until moving here has always been one of your days just getting eaten alive by meetings and driving and waiting at places, realizing you haven’t eaten all day and being starving and punchy and impatient and exhausted. It might get different as we live here more and sort of stretch out, but it hasn’t been any different than that yet. There’s a phrase “The work will fill the time,” except in this case “the work” isn’t always actual work: it’s often just driving or sitting or waiting or lingering because you think you might need to talk to someone when it turns out later they left already.

On our way out of the garlic restaurant, there are three people in front of the hostess’ stand, just standing there completely still, smiling off in some direction, a corner we can’t see around. We stop, naturally, because it looks like they’re having their picture taken. They just stand there. We assume there’s someone with a camera around that corner but there’s no flash and they don’t move or speak. They weren’t here before. They aren’t statues. Right? Finally a flash goes off. One of the women moves and speaks, apologizing for how hard her camera is to work. A waiter comes around the corner with the camera and hands it to the woman. I am a little disappointed it wasn’t some prank, getting us to just stand there, caught in this subconscious force-field of someone’s-taking-a-picture.

The valet brings my new (used) never-Gray-Marketed car around. Everyone gets in and while we’re waiting to turn out of the parking lot I ask who sings the song that’s playing. (It’s “London Calling.”) Nobody knows. Meggie tells me that’s a dad question to ask. I make my first Los Angeles left turn and drive us all home.

Posted by DC at June 13, 2009 01:22 AM